Indiana

In 2005, Indiana established a state poet laureate position, which is currently held by Matthew Graham, who was appointed to a two-year term in 2020. Graham is the author of four books, most recently The Geography of Home (Galileo Press, 2018).

In 2018, Alaina Polen was appointed as the poet laureate of Highland, Indiana.

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Indiana poet laureaute

Adrian Matejka

Adrian Matejka was born into a military family in Nuremburg, Germany, in 1971, and he grew up in California and Indiana. He received a BA from Indiana University in 1995 and an MFA from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale in 2001.

He is the author of Map to the Stars (Penguin, 2017); The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), which won the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Mixology (Penguin, 2009), which was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series; and The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), which received the 2002 New York/New England Book Award.

Matejka’s poetry is known for its inventive, often multidisciplinary exploration of identity and cultural history. Rodney Jones writes, "Adrian Matejka plays the language like a horn, with a cool inventiveness and bravura phrasing, yet his poems are as notable for their humanity as their flourishes and riffs at the borders of expression. His singular gift is to write outside the usual habits of communication and yet to deliver again and again the inside story, the testament of a life."

In an interview with Barely South Review, he cites the poet Yusef Komunyakaa as an influence: “He was like an emcee—or maybe more appropriately, a jazz soloist. When I heard him read, I knew I wanted to write poems.”

Matejka is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the Lannan Foundation, and United States Artists, among others. In 2018, he was appointed state poet laureate of Indiana. In 2019, Matejka received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently teaches creative writing at Indiana University. He lives with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown, in Bloomington, Indiana.

posture as close to an ocean as the scrubbrush, gulls, & rocks around here will get.

2.

Every town around herehas a Central Avenue, completewith blustery flags & home-cooked meals. Blank storefronts& churches next to other churches—lake light filtering throughtheir stained glass windowsmost sunny afternoons after 3pm.Steeples, one after another,like the Great Lakes’ wavestrying to blink constant sandout of wet eyes. & at night, all of the avenue lights up. No streetlights, but stars & moon blinkingin agitated water while the industriallights on the fringes dim like blankfaces traced in constellations.

3.

Listen to the Sand Hill Cranes foldinginto the dim fringes

of themselves like prayer hands.Listen to the yellow

warblers clustered up in the middleof knotted branches

like a hungry chorus in these perfectlypaused trees. Even

at night, the birds grab sand-swirled airwith nonchalant wings.

4.

In the day or at night, central is centrālis in Latin & means exactlywhat the warblers, trees, & restless dunes think it means: rufflesof sand between the angry human fist & the equally angryhuman face of industry, deregulations & pollutants as uninvitedas the sea lamprey wiggling through the locks & canals.

5.

After the canals & their creaking locks & the oxidized ships & their bleary horns,

the sun edges the blue between cuffed waves & unrepentant shore. After gravity’s

insoluble gears pull all of this water away from Central Avenue & back to the center

& the fish swim away from shore through the gills of noises & sediment in that sideways

way fish do. In a lake this big, it’s possible to swim in circles all day & get no further

from the moon than this parade of whitecaps on the edges of the dunes. The same

frustrated tendencies of circle, these waves. The same cornered ingenuity, this great lake.